"First run. Two people, a flashlight. Back before dark."
Sector File 01, Street Debris - from the operations table in Shelter 38
Hi, I'm canNibal
I'm making Leave Them Outside, and from now until Early Access I'm going to post a log like this every week. What I built, what broke, and what I learned fixing it. I'm starting with the room where every expedition begins.
Where expeditions start
Fourteen days after the strike, the only way to get food, medicine or news is to send someone outside. In the game you do that from the operations table. You open a sector file, read what the survivors already know about the place, and fill in the expedition order: who goes, what they take, and what their orders are. Do they look for supplies, people or information? Do they avoid contact, talk, or shoot first? Do they come back before dark, or at any cost?
When the form is done, you sign it and stamp it. That signature is the moment I care about most. Somebody is walking out of that door because you wrote their name on a piece of paper.
A paper map in 33 languages
The table is covered by a two-metre military map of Kadıköy, on the Asian side of Istanbul. Until this week every word on it was baked into one big texture, and all of it was in Turkish.
So I split it in two. The map now comes without any text, and every label (the legend with 36 places, the title strip, the sea, the notes the survivors scribbled on it) is written in your language when the room loads and placed back on the paper. The paper has fold creases, so the text follows the same creases instead of floating flat on top. Long German and Finnish place names shrink to fit their boxes instead of spilling out.
That's 69 lines in 33 languages, and I checked every one of them against the game's glossary, so "shelter" and "expedition" mean the same thing on the map as everywhere else.
Next week
I'm going back to the people at the door: their faces, their clothes, and how they hold up under the shelter lights.
Leave Them Outside comes to Early Access on December 1, 2026, for PC and Mac. If the shelter sounds like your kind of place, a wishlist helps me more than you'd think.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5281900/
Thanks for reading,
canNibal